I doubt that was the question. The question was about direct JP imports of games that are not released in eng at all, I think.

Region lock doesn't affect me in the slightest. Never in my life I have had the need to import a game from Europe or Japan, and most games than don't get localized don't really interest me. Even if I wanted to it would extremely expensive to do it, and no game is worth throwing that cash.

In any case, while I consider region lock be a bad practice, is not something that actually affects a huge amount of people, sucks for the 5 Europeans who wanted to play this game, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't affect that many people. This isn't the case for Rune Factory 4, but like Ganoncrotch said, how many people can really enjoy Japanese games and fully understand them, or what about Europeans who don't speak English either? 

Again, I think region locking is a bad practice, it probably doesn't cost Nintendo anything to make all 3Ds in the world the same, but I feel like a lot of users like to take things out of proportion, in reality most people don't care that much.

Meanwhile, Atlus locks Persona 4 Arena's NA release, making it the only PS3 game that's region locked. Both so Japan doesn't reverse-import, and that Europe doesn't (the game came to Europe quite a while later, and Atlus knew that).

People do care, and people will import.

No, I swear there was a previous Ps3 game that was region-locked :P

Name it!

Welp, I didn't find it.

Because, luckily, there isn't one

I never played this game yet although I am curious about it... It seems interesting but I never played a game in the franchise before and I was waiting for a sale that never came but oh well, maybe one day

As for the thread, well that sucks but at least EU finally doesn't get something that NA gets, usually we are left in the shitter for a lot of things so now you guys get to feel our pain muahaha

Do you have hard numbers on how many people import the game? On you are basing on people backslah on the web?

I'm basing it on an actual business decision by Atlus, whose fans are leaning to the hardcore side of things. Intentionally blocking import, they've shown that it has impact.